This memoir of loss is both heartbreaking and astonishingly beautiful. Deraniyagala, a native of Sri Lanka, was visiting home with her British husband and their two little boys when the tsunami hit the day after Christmas in 2004. Swept away when the Jeep they were in couldn’t outrace the furious waters, she was the only survivor in the horror that also killed her parents.

The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates (HarperCollins)

Edward Cullen meets Grover Cleveland? In her new novel, Oates, arguably Princeton University’s most famous current professor, twines the known history of her Ivy-covered community with the unknown. In the early 1900s, vampires and ghosts romp a terrain already populated not only by Cleveland but also Woodrow Wilson, Upton Sinclair, Jack London and Mark Twain — who are all plagued by supernatural visions. Meanwhile, it turns out that Pine Barrens surrounding Princeton contain the gates to hell. Only in New Jersey.

Born on a Mountaintop

On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier

by Bob Thompson (Crown)

Former Washington Post editor Thompson blames his daughter for the obsession that led to his highly readable book — one part history, one part pop culture, one part travelogue. At 4, she heard Disney’s “Davy Crockett” theme on a car trip, and the rest is history. Thompson calls Crockett “the first celebrity politician,” writing how he initiated a book tour for his memoir way back in 1834. He takes us to the Alamo, gets into the career of Fess Parker, who played Crockett in the 1950s on TV, sparking a coonskin-cap craze, and informs us that the real Davy Crockett was actually born by the non-mountainous banks of a Tennessee river.

Hopper

by Tom Folsom (It Books)

You could say that actor Dennis Hopper beat the odds. Although this embodiment of the excesses of the ’60s was a sure candidate to “live fast and die young,” he was 76 when he died in 2010. Folsom carries the reader on a caffeine-and-other-substance-fueled ride: The road runs through Hopper’s poor Kansas childhood, palling with James Dean on “Rebel Without a Cause.” There’s Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda with “Easy Rider.” And John Wayne, too, who hired Hopper for “Durango,” after he was blackballed for bad behavior (he asked him to get off the “loco weed”). And, of course, the eight-day marriage to Michelle Phillips.

Room No. 10

by Ake Edwardson (Simon & Schuster)

Perhaps not surprisingly, Swede Edwardson’s newest Nordic thriller revolves around a cold case. Once again, Gothenburg Chief Inspector Erik Winter, a philosophical loner, is on the job when a woman is found hanged in a seedy hotel room, and one odd clue points to foul play. Turns out, it’s the same room where another young woman was last seen before she was found dead 20 years earlier — when Winter was starting out. Convinced he’s tracking the same killer, Winter’s own life is in danger.